The Emergence Of Modern Human Behavior

人类与相互竞争的物种之间的高度灭绝联系在一起，不仅在工业化农业的现代世界，甚至从我们物种--智人--在更新世时期的第一次出现开始。事实上，人类进化中的一个基本问题是，来自非洲的最早的现代人与他们的欧亚竞争对手尼安德特人之间的互动是什么性质，导致后者在3万年前灭绝？体格人类学表明，现代人的优势不是体能。因此，目前的考古学研究重点放在现代人类景观适应上，即他们如何在时间和空间上对资源的使用制定战略(他们如何狩猎动物、觅食植物和依靠其他人类获得安全)，这可能有别于他们在进化中的近亲。测试尼安德特人和现代人类景观适应之间的对比的相互矛盾的假说，需要从遗址挖掘中获得高分辨率的考古数据，并有可能区分出居住者在该地点从事的活动。由明尼苏达大学的Gilbert Tostevin博士和Gilliane Monnier博士以及捷克共和国、德国和以色列的同事组成的多学科小组将调查这样一个遗址，捷克共和国的Tvaro ná-Za Kolou，其中包含考古文化文物，最有可能代表现代人类对尼安德特人占领的欧洲的最早渗透。这种文化，博亨尼人，似乎已经从近东传播到中欧，但并没有比波希米亚更西边，也没有比乌克兰西部更东边。博亨人对尼安德特人的适应取得了有限的成功，这与奥里尼纳人形成了鲜明对比。奥里尼纳人是一种现代人类文化，5000年后传播到整个欧洲，与尼安德特人的灭绝有关。Tvaro ná-Za Kolou的项目旨在产生迄今为止关于博亨人景观适应的最高分辨率数据，从而提高考古学家对比博亨人、奥里尼纳克人和尼安德特人景观适应的能力。该项目不仅将有助于辨别是什么让现代人的冰河时代祖先如此成功，它还将为美国、捷克和其他国家的研究生提供现场和实验室培训，这些研究生在团队中创新的微考古和3D文物建模技术，后者提供了第一个公开可访问的整个遗址的文物数字收藏。该项目的目标是对Tvaro ná-Za Kolou遗址进行高分辨率的挖掘、分析和年代测定。通过重建遗址中与使用未保存(但可以在遗址沉积物中化学检测到的)有机文物有关的石器生产，该团队将建立一种新的方法，以确定遗址在人口景观适应范围内的功能如何影响遗址的人工内容。当应用于该地区的其他遗址时，这种方法将改变考古学家理解现代人和尼安德特人在这个地区和其他地区的适应性差异的能力。

Humanity has been associated with high levels of extinctions among competing species, not only in the modern world of industrialized agriculture but even from the first appearance of our species, Homo sapiens, during the Pleistocene Epoch. In fact, one of the fundamental questions in human evolution is, what was the nature of the interaction between the earliest modern humans from Africa and their Eurasian competitors, the Neanderthals, that resulted in the latter's extinction 30,000 years ago? Physical anthropology shows that the modern human advantage was not physical prowess. Current archaeological research thus focuses on the modern human landscape adaptation, i.e., how they strategized use of resources in time and space (how they hunted animals, foraged for plants, and relied on other humans for security), as potentially distinct from their evolutionary cousins. Testing competing hypotheses of the contrast between Neanderthal and modern human landscape adaptations requires high-resolution archaeological data from the excavation of sites with the potential to discriminate what activities the occupants were pursuing in that given site. The multidisciplinary team created by Dr. Gilbert Tostevin & Dr. Gilliane Monnier, both of the University of Minnesota, along with colleagues in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Israel, will investigate one such site, Tvaro ná-Za kolou in the Czech Republic, that contains artifacts of the archaeological culture most likely representing the earliest modern human penetration into Neanderthal-occupied Europe. This culture, the Bohunician, appears to have spread into Central Europe from the Near East but did not penetrate further west than Bohemia, nor further east than western Ukraine. The limited success of the Bohunician adaptation over the Neanderthals stands in contrast to the Aurignacian, the modern human culture that spread 5,000 years later across all of Europe and is associated with the extinction of the Neanderthals. The project at Tvaro ná-Za kolou is designed to produce the highest resolution of data on the Bohunician landscape adaptation to date, thereby advancing archaeologists' ability to contrast the Bohunician, Aurignacian, and Neanderthal landscape adaptations. Not only will the project help discriminate what made modern humans' Ice Age ancestors so successful, it will also provide field and laboratory training for US, Czech, and other nations' graduate students in the teams innovative microarchaeological and 3D artifact modeling techniques, the latter providing the first publicly-accessible digital collection of artifacts from the entirety of a site of this age.The aim of this project is the high-resolution excavation, analysis, and dating of the Tvaro ná-Za kolou site. By reconstructing stone tool production at the site in relation to the use of organic artifacts that did not preserve (but that can be detected chemically in the site's sediment), the team will establish a new method for determining how a site's function within the population's landscape adaptation affects the artifactual content of the site. When applied to other sites in the region, this approach will transform archaeologists' ability to understand adaptive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals in this, and other, regions.